PARIS — The annual VivaTech conference in Paris concluded its 2026 session with discussions on artificial intelligence, labor, and national sovereignty. The event drew 180,000 attendees. Tech leaders including Jeff Bezos, Yann LeCun, and Aidan Gomez addressed economic and geopolitical aspects of AI development.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon Executive Chairman, was a headliner at the event. He stated that AI will create a labor shortage rather than mass redundancy. Bezos also discussed a vision of relocating heavy industry off Earth and establishing a permanent industrial presence on the Moon. In other developments at the conference, two humanoid robots drifted backward during a choreographed demonstration, causing two screens to fall.

Yann LeCun, Executive Chairman of AMI Labs, suggested a potential economic risk for the AI industry. He stated that the industry could be heading for a "big bubble explosion" if companies do not reduce costs quickly enough. LeCun also addressed AI sovereignty, saying, "The governments of the world all want AI sovereignty. The only way I can see this happening is if there's an open, free foundation model, on top of which anybody can build their own specialized assistant for their own language, culture, value system, and political biases." LeCun is involved with Project Tapestry, an initiative aimed at building a frontier foundation model through government and private industry collaboration.

OpenAI expanded its Daybreak initiative on June 24, 2026, pairing its GPT-5.5-Cyber with an open-source patching effort named Patch the Planet. This initiative involves collaborations with Cloudflare, Cisco, and CrowdStrike. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, emphasized domestically controlled infrastructure for AI sovereignty, including chips, power, data centers, and private deployment under national control. Gomez also recommended that countries form strategic alliances to counteract the influence of the U.S. and China in AI infrastructure if domestic control proves unfeasible. Gomez added, "We need to ensure that a democracy occupies the number two position, and that's not true today. I think the G7 understands that we need a diverse supply chain of AI providers."

On June 1, 2026, Gomez also signed a memorandum of understanding with Indra, a Spanish technology company, alongside the King of Spain. Cohere has an existing partnership with the German AI firm Aleph Alpha. Softbank committed 75 billion euros to build data centers in France, pending regulatory approvals. Schneider Electric has made AI training mandatory for its entire staff of 42,000 employees. Additionally, Emmanuel Macron's "Choose France" initiative has secured pledges exceeding 100 billion euros for AI infrastructure.